How New Tech Keeps Your Racy Photos Private

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Storing racy photos using cloud storage can be risky. Customers
of the image-hosting service Photobucket learned their lesson the
hard way last year when hackers plucked nude photos from the site
and posted them in a public forum. And with today's facial
recognition technology and vast public databases like Google
Images, it's not difficult to put a name with a face.

But researchers at USC have come up with a new tool to thwart
those who would expose private photos.

Engineering professors Antonio Ortega and Ramesh Govindan teamed
with USC Ph.D. student Moo-Ryong Ra to design and test a two-part
system called P3 (Privacy-Preserving Photo Sharing). P3 uses
partial encryption that allows users to share photos and to
control who can see them. To date, the program works with
Facebook and Flickr, but could easily be adapted for other
networks, such as Instagram, according to the team. [See
also: Private
Porn Pics Aren't Private for Long ]

How it works

P3 splits a photo into two parts: a public part, which contains
most of the original and is uploaded to a website, and a secret
part that contains most of the original’s information but is
stored separately from the photo-sharing site. Only when viewers
are given access by the photo's owner to the "secret" part can
the photo be seen; otherwise, the image appears as a gray box.

While photo encryption
programs are available, most sites block them because the
programs prevent sites from scaling images to fit designated
formats; the programs also prevent them from resizing photos to
fit different sizes of device screens.

P3 also provides security for photographers who are concerned
about a website using photos without compensating them.

"Nobody doubts the convenience of cloud-based sharing; the
question is whether we can trust third parties to protect our
photos from unauthorized distribution or use," Ortega said in a
statement.

Who controls user content?

Instagram faced an uproar late last year when celebrities left
the photo-sharing site, fearing that Instagram's
new service terms would allow it to use photos for
advertising. While Instagram assured users it would not use their
photos, terms of service for most social media sites leave the
door open to accessing user content without permission.

"Facebook still retains the rights to the portion of the photo
that you've uploaded — but that portion is a degraded,
unrecognizable mess," Ortega said. "Only you retain the rights to
the complete photo."

The P3 technology has been granted a provisional patent and the
research team plans to launch a company this summer to market it
to the public. They suggested that photo-sharing
sites could offer P3 as a paid service to users.